Dirty Digest #26: February 2025

My openings are super-tight

Hello all. Busy newsletter this month, let’s get straight down to things.

And speaking of busy, your musical accompaniment for this edition is the following delightful Sabrina Carpenter track, finally given a proper release instead of being hidden away on US-only album special editions:

The line “My clothes are off, I’m coming over to your place” makes me laugh, mainly because of the order of the two actions listed.

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Things I Am Not Researching

One thing which I have to deal with when researching all my various bits of nonsense is knowing when to stop. Sometimes, you come across a mystery which will simply take too much effort to uncover.

For instance, take the title sequence to The Mrs Merton Show, first broadcast on the 10th February 1995.

It features the following newspaper headline, as a sign of everything going to the dogs:

SLAUGHTER IN THE SUBURBS.

So, which edition of the Manchester Evening News is the above prop based on? That, at least, was fairly easy to figure out: it’s the edition published on the 25th November 1994, which was easily found by searching for the “Mortgage giants” headline.

SLAUGHTER OF AN INNOCENT.

But here’s where we run into a quandary. The headline used in Mrs Merton, “SLAUGHTER IN THE SUBURBS”, feels like something written by Caroline & Co, in order to tell the story of the title sequence. But the actual edition of the paper the prop is based on has a very similar headline. So exactly what is the order of events here?

Potential theories:

• Caroline & Co saw the real headline, decided it was perfect for their title sequence, so got the Manchester Evening News to mock up a front cover. They changed the headline in order to make sure a nice friendly comedy show wasn’t directly linked to actual murders.

• The paper in the title sequence uses a genuine headline, SLAUGHTER IN THE SUBURBS… which was from an earlier edition of that day’s Manchester Evening News, which hasn’t survived in any of the online newspaper archives.

• Caroline & Co saw the real headline, decided it was perfect for their title sequence, so the show’s prop department mocked up a front cover themselves, changing the headline to reduce the links to the real murder… somehow managing to get the perfect font for the replacement, which is incredibly rare when it comes to this kind of thing in TV and film. (I think this is the least likely.)

• Caroline & Co never saw the original headline at all, and simply asked the Manchester Evening News for a vaguely appropriate prop to match what they wanted the title sequence to say. The Manchester Evening News found an appropriate front page themselves, and then changed it so, again, a comedy show wouldn’t be linked to actual murders.

Or any combination of the above. Actually finding out the truth of this is probably more trouble than its worth. But if anybody wants a challenge, be my guest.

Although the truly interesting thing about the above isn’t exactly what the order of events was. It’s that a headline which felt entirely written for the show, turns out to be at the very least partially based in reality. It’s also a bit of an uncomfortable revelation, so let’s move on.

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This Month on Dirty Feed

Only one proper piece this month: In Place of Helen, on all the different title sequences to Drop the Dead Donkey. You heard.

This piece has gone down better than anything else I’ve done recently. After a few months of feeling a bit grumpy and adrift with my writing, I seem to have fallen into a pattern where I’m trying to write up various things I’ve half-researched and never completed over the years. I first meant to write this Drop the Dead Donkey piece seven years ago.

I think the oldest thing on my list is from 22 years ago…

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Things I Am Researching

One other thing I’ve been meaning to write for years is a piece on Grant Naylor’s work on BBC1 sketch show Three of a Kind. This is a period in their career which is often-mentioned, but usually just comes down to the phrase “and then they wrote for Three of a Kind”.

So, until my big article where I list every single sketch they ever wrote for the series, how about revealing what their first broadcast material in that show was? The answer: “Wingy Wangy Song” from Series 2 Episode 1, transmitted on the 27th November 1982:

Which, of course, comes across as a very early incarnation of Tongue Tied. A slightly different reasoning involved - nothing romantic here, he just doesn’t know the words - but the essential idea is the same. That song is a well-remembered piece of Red Dwarf, but less well-remembered is that a version of Tongue Tied was first broadcast in Radio 4 sketch show Son of Cliche, on the 11th October 1983. That’s almost exactly a year after the Three of a Kind material above.

Funny what connections you can make when you actually go back and watch things properly. It’s taken me three decades of Red Dwarf fandom to get round to it.

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Not on Dirty Feed

• Morecambe and Wise at the Movies - I relistened to this episode of Jaffa Cakes for Proust recently, and it’s one of my favourites. So few podcasts manage to tread the right line so carefully, between not taking the default opinion automatically, but not being a tedious contrarian either. Tilt Araiza and Gary Rodger manage it brilliantly.

• All the Adventures: Drive In - I link to Jason Dyer’s stuff too much really, but it’s not my fault how great he is. Two brilliant pieces this month - firstly this, on an extremely early pornographic text adventure from 1982…

• All the Adventures: Kim Venture - …and this, on how you can write an electronic adventure game for something which barely resembles a computer as we think of them today.

• Fox’s New Scorebug Graphic Design - By John Gruber. I don’t much care about the Super Bowl or indeed score graphics, and Gruber’s writing about television and film is usually… not to my taste. And yet from this unpromising stew comes a genuinely fascinating, well-researched point.

• The Cutting Room Floor: Mechanized Attack - You know all those rumoured “nude codes” in videogames which turn out to be a load of bollocks? Here’s a genuine one. Admittedly, it’s for the NES, so you’re going to struggle to get a wank out of it.

• Bots Bots Bots - A game where you have to hide your humanity and pretend to be a bot, in order to hack into a corporation made up of AI employees. This is precisely 100 times more fun than it sounds. And yes, I won.

• These other Londons: the imagined city of the backlots - By Ray Newman, on fake London backlots. Lovely work, I could read a version ten times the length.

• Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 - This is my very favourite kind of thing on the internet. Firstly, go beyond the obvious cliches: in this case, that E.T. is the worst game ever made. Secondly, actually do something about the game’s failures, rather than just whinging. You don’t need to understand the coding bits here to have fun with this one.

• How BBC Wales returned live to 1985 - How BBC Wales brought back the COW… with the original hardware, rendering the globe live. See also the video BBC Wales COW Revival.

• Star Trek TNG, but the theme is coming from the Enterprise-D - God, this is stupid. Good.

• Batman, “The Joker is Wild” script - An original script from 1965, hand-written amendments and all. Beautiful. I want this for every episode. (via @waltydunlop)

• The Moorgate Train Disaster - A truly insightful and affecting piece of writing by Laurence Marks. Watch out for the drama mentioned at the end of the piece, broadcast on Radio 4 on the 26th/27th of this month.

• Club for Television Viewers? - A fun insight into early television fans by John Wyver… and about the identity of the mysterious writer known as ‘The Scanner’. (via Billy Smart)

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And I leave you with the following sitcom theme, broadcast only once in the US before the show was cancelled. Blame Neil Miles for linking me to it. God help me, I think it’s genuinely well-constructed and funny, never trust me about television ever again.